Synopsis

“Why do I hit the child I love?” Author Miri Yū reveals family secrets and the dark feelings she has struggled with for much of her life in this raw, unvarnished record of a series of intensive counseling sessions she underwent.

Yū, 41, lives in Kamakura with her nine-year-old son and her 26-year-old lover. Tormented by bipolar disorder and insomnia, she has a history of exploding in anger at her son, abusing him both verbally and physically. Beginning in August 2009, she undergoes counseling with clinical psychologist Hirokazu Hasegawa, a child abuse and family pathology specialist.

Yū is shaken when told by Hasegawa that both her father’s domestic violence and her mother’s unmotherly treatment of her children constituted child abuse. He tells her that the absence of maternal love in her own upbringing has left her without a sense of motherhood for herself. In the course of relating her dreams to Hasegawa, Yū learns to identify the Jungian “wise old man” archetypes in them.

During her final counseling session on January 25, 2010, Yū describes a dream suggestive of death and rebirth. This dream, too, includes a sage-like figure. Upon listening to her description, Hasegawa declares their sessions finished, saying the wise old man will awaken her and help along the road to recovery.

Yū’s condition worsens after that, and she is tormented by a death wish as well as both visual and auditory hallucinations. On March 31, she turns off her cell phone and visits the Gumyōji district of Yokohama, where she had lived as a child. There she begins opening up to her internal sage about the pain she is in. As she does so, she gradually comes to understand how she has been piling blame on herself within the confines of her family, repressing her true feelings. Then she brings her narrative to an end by saying, “I am grieving for myself.”

About the Author

Miri Yū(1968–) is a citizen of South Korea born and raised in Japan as a permanent resident, and is one of the best-known Zainichi (“resident in Japan”) Korean authors writing in Japanese today. Her works enjoy popularity and critical acclaim in South Korea as well. She is often classified as a writer of “I-novels” because much of her fiction is closely autobiographical. In her nonfiction memoir Inochi (Life), she tells of falling in love with a married man and giving birth to his child after they have parted ways, and of returning to a former lover, the theater group leader who first recognized her talent as a writer, to care for him as he battles cancer. The work became a huge bestseller, and the memoir grew to four volumes as she nursed the love of her life to the end and mourned his death. Yū worked as an actress and playwright before she began publishing fiction in 1994. In 1996, her Furuhausu (Full House, a volume containing two novellas) garnered the Izumi Kyōka Prize and the Noma Prize for New Writers, and the following year her novella Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) received the coveted Akutagawa Prize. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 she has been a frequent visitor to Fukushima and continues to host a radio show in which she interviews victims displaced by the triple disaster. Her other major works include Gold Rush (tr. 2002), Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August), Guddobai mama (Goodbye Mama), and Jei-āru Ueno-eki kōen-guchi (Japan Railways Ueno Station, Park Entrance).yu-miri.jp/Books by this author